Red State Retracts Claim That David Hogg Lied About Being on Campus During the Parkland Shooting

David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez take a moment to be High School seniors and teenagers with a selfie. (@davidhogg111/Twitter)

Gun rights advocates, in an attempt to maintain the status quo at any cost, repeatedly target those they see as threats to guns. One of their favorite current targets is a 17 year old survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, David Hogg.

Using altered images and easily disproved claims, gun rights proponents and alt-right media outlets, and even a few members of Congress, attempt to discredit the children from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A quick search of Twitter or Facebook shows 17 year old David Hogg as one of the top two targets for their attacks.

A student journalist, the 17 year old senior at the Parkland, Florida, school first gained notoriety for videoing interviews with his classmates during the shooting. Huddled together in a closet during the shooting, students began to call family members.

“That’s kind of around the same time that I just had to pull out my phone,” Hogg said in an interview shortly after the shooting. “It was sheer terror,” he added, but as an aspiring journalist he felt the moment needed to be documented so the world could see what happens to children during these mass shootings.

The school shooting at Stoneman Douglas was the 18th of 2018, the 8th where someone other than the gunman was injured. 9 more school shootings have occurred since the Parkland tragedy where 17 people were murdered.

Since the shooting, students from the school organized calls for gun reform, including a student walkout on the 1 month anniversary of the Parkland shooting and the March for Our Lives on March 24. Their call for stricter gun regulations put them in the cross-hairs of the gun rights advocates, like the National Rifle Association (NRA).